Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 263existing capital ships, yet heavily enough gunned to overpower any
lesser target, their technical expertise and readiness to sell to any
comer who could pay the price began to bring British naval security
into question.^1
Swift cruisers were particularly menacing to Britain at a time when
the nation had come to depend on food coming from across the At
lantic. From the mid-1870s, cheaper transportation made it possible to
ship wheat and other foodstuffs to Liverpool and London from the
distant plains of North America (and soon also from Argentina and
Australia) at prices below those which British farmers could match. As
a result, in the absence of tariffs of the kind that protected other
European nations from the full force of overseas agricultural competi
tion, crop farming in Great Britain decayed drastically.^2 Cheaper
bread for consumers, however beneficial to the urban working classes,
also meant a radically increased vulnerability. By the 1880s, when 65
percent of Britain’s grain came from overseas, a fleet of enemy cruis
ers capable of intercepting grain shipments from the other side of the
Atlantic could be expected to bring Great Britain face to face with
starvation in a matter of months.
This possibility invited French politicians and naval officers to
renew their long-standing rivalry with Britain at sea. A group of naval
theorists, the so-called jeune école, argued that specialized gunboats for
shore bombardment, plus fast cruisers and even faster torpedo boats,
were all that France needed to nullify Britain’s naval preeminence.
Such vessels had the enormous attraction of being cheap. One ar
mored warship cost as much as sixty torpedo boats; yet one torpedo
could sink any existing warship if its warhead hit below the water line.
After the French disaster of 1870–71, reequipment of the army had to
take precedence. Hence, a plan that promised to diminish the cost of
- Fast, heavily gunned cruisers proved very salable. Altogether, Armstrong’s built no
fewer than eighty-four warships for twelve different foreign governments between
1884 and 1914. More than once in the course of these thirty years, a technical advance
introduced on behalf of a foreign customer compelled the Royal Navy to tag along and
order equivalent improvements in its warships. In addition to the Chilean cruiser of
1882, the eight-inch guns Armstrong’s provided for the Russian cruiser Rurik (launched
- is the best-known instance of this kind of whipsaw. Cf. David Dougan, The Great
Gunmaker: The Story of Lord Armstrong (Newcastle-on-Tyne, n.d.), pp. 138–44; Donald
W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power (New York, 1974), p. 193.
- Wheat prices fell from 56s. 9d. a quarter in 1877 to a nadir of 22s. 10d. in 1894.
Acreage under wheat dropped by about 50 percent between 1872 and the end of the
century; rents declined, though not as much; emigration from the countryside assumed
almost catastrophic proportions. Yet real wages rose by something like 77 percent
between I860 and 1900. These statistics are from R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914
(Oxford, 1936), pp. 115–16, 275, 284–86.